


Ifrit was an Accident

by LookBetweenTheLines



Series: Complaints of a Hero [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Early Game, Gen, Male!WoL - Freeform, Miqo'te!WoL - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 21:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16395116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookBetweenTheLines/pseuds/LookBetweenTheLines
Summary: Z'kila Tia agreed to support the Immortal Flames in the attempt to prevent Ifrit's summoning. He did NOT agree to face the primal head-on with just three strangers.He needed to have strong words with the Scions if he got out of this in one unscorched piece.





	Ifrit was an Accident

**Author's Note:**

> So I started replaying the story from scratch recently, and it struck me that it doesn't matter what your character is asked to do, he's always ready and willing to do it. The game represents him as superhumanly altruistic (or as a maniac with a death wish) so it got me thinking:  
> What if he wasn't?

If you asked Z'kila, and so very few people did, he thought that all this Warrior of Light bother started with Ifrit’s first incarnation. 

Well, it probably wasn’t the first. Just the first since Z'kila came to Thanalan. 

He’d been asked to go along to the Amalj’aa summoning as support. Obviously. He was an archer, archers didn’t go anywhere near the frontlines unless the frontlines came to them. This was, of course, before he’d met Jehantel and learnt to hold is own in close combat. In any case, it wasn’t long after he returned from Copperbell that the request came; now, the hecatoncheires had been a bit of a shock, but the four of them that went in all came back out again so as far as Z'kila was concerned it went well. He was paid decently well for his contribution, and he’d assumed that was that.

But no. 

To this day, he didn’t know why he was the one the Scions wanted, why he was the one called back to join the Immortal Flames in preventing Ifrit’s summoning. He hadn’t questioned it much at the time because he’d been given a supporting role. Besides, the whole point was to prevent the summoning, and he’d dealt with Amalj’aa before. 

Alas, it didn’t go that way. 

Where the Eorzean propaganda got their story of him marching heroically into the Bowl of Embers to challenge the mighty Ifrit singlehandedly Z'kila would never know. Perhaps if the true story had been told things would have turned out very differently for him.

\---

Z'kila dug the heels of his boots into the dusty ground, gouging out two lines as the Amalj’aa guards dragged him between them, if truth be told. While his mind couldn’t form anything more coherent than _no no no no no,_ he had noticed the other three adventurers that had been roped into the whole ordeal along with the entire Flames regiment that had been betrayed were with him. Some were struggling as fiercely as he was, but others walked with terrifying calm. 

Then the summoning: a leading Amalj’aa chanted some kind of twisted prayer and then the great fiery fiend jumped out of a ball of flame. It glowed with internal fire, horns gleaming and eyes shining. One of the Flames made a noise like a strangled whimper and Z'kila could hardly blame him. 

_Yeah, okay, yeah, no thanks,_ he thought, frantically fighting his captors. Turns out Amalj’aa are pretty strong. 

Ifrit engulfed the party in a wave of blue fire. Z'kila swore he didn’t make a sound. Really his shriek was probably lost in the louder screams of his comrades. The heat was intense, washing over every inch of his skin even beneath his clothes and through his hair, as red as the Infernian, but strangely didn’t hurt. The flame flickered on his clothes before sputtering out. Z'kila watched them disappear. His knees gave, held up only by the Amalj’aa captors.

‘O mighty Ifrit…’ said the Flame sergeant.

Wait. What?

Z'kila looked over at him, trying to make sense of what his eyes were showing him through the haze of terror still clouding his mind. It wasn’t just the Flame sergeant; all of those captured were leaning forwards, hands outstretched, finally released, moaning about Ifrit being ‘the one true god’ or some other such nonsense. The other three adventurers had been released, but none of them seemed to have been influenced with whatever curse the fiend had attempted.  


The Amalj’aa dropped Z'kila suddenly.

‘Oof!’ He landed on his rear, knees still reluctant to hold him. The leading Amalj’aa peered between the four of them. Z'kila was no expert on reading their expressions and he was too preoccupied to try and listen to the rough words he spoke. He sounded confused—as confused as Z'kila was, at any rate. 

Ifrit roared again, sounding far more raged now. Jeci'to, the lancer, helped Z'kila scramble to his feet. He stumbled a couple of times and grabbed his bow between shaking fingers, favouring it over his knives simply because he did not want to get close to that thing. There had to be a reason they left them armed; namely because they didn’t have a hope in hells against a primal. 

In an instant, Z'kila was alone in the face of the primal Ifrit with three amateur adventurers he’d met a matter of hours before, and only one of them he knew by name. Hells, none of them were that experienced. By the time Ifrit had finished roaring, Z'kila had already accepted his fiery demise and his bow had drooped in his grasp. 

Then the Lalafell conjuror cast Protect on the lot of them. ‘What?’ he challenged when the other three looked to him. ‘You want to die here without even trying?’

So, they tried. 

The gladiator hyur charged the fiend. Jeci'to gripped his spear and ran hot on his heels, encouraging Z'kila with a mischievous grin. Z'kila was a little slower to react, to pull an arrow from his quiver and lift his bow to aim. The first arrow missed its mark. The second scraped the fiery hide. The third drove home through a glowing crack in the skin. 

_Okay,_ Z'kila thought, _okay, we can do this. We might do this._

If he lied enough to himself, maybe he’d start to believe it. 

Unlikely.

A blast of fire thrown outwards caught all of them and flung them backwards. The hyur rolled out the flames, shrieking. Jeci'to had lunged aside to avoid the worst of it. Z'kila and the conjuror had just about managed to keep their feet, bow and staff dropped to hysterically pat away the fire. 

That happened twice more, but Z'kila managed to keep far enough away to avoid it. Jeci'to was light enough on his toes to stay mostly unscorched. But then the ground began to crack and open up, mere seconds’ worth of warning before an eruption of fire exploded underfoot. 

Even though the soles of his boots were completely fried, Z'kila didn’t stop moving after that. He circled from one side to the other, constantly running and hopping over fire crevices us, stopping only to pat out a flame or two, shooting his meagre supply of poison arrows. Ifrit was starting to look like a hedgehog, the shafts poking out of his smoking hide. A maniacal giggle burst from his lips at the thought before he was moving again. 

There was never a point at which they had the advantage—Z'kila wasn’t that optimistic—but they were hurting him some. Ifrit bled fire from open wounds, hunks of hide slashed out by the sword. They had him limping—eventually—but that was nothing compared to the state they were in. The conjuror was nearly on the floor with exhaustion. The clothes had all but been singed off poor Jeci'to and the gladiator gritted his teeth against the heat. Z'kila wasn’t fairing much better. 

An enormous gust of fire encompassed everything five fulms in front of Ifrit and Z'kila lifted an arm to protect his face. When he looked again, Jeci'to was screaming and the gladiator was on the ground, unmoving. Portions of skin exposed in the plate were scorched black. 

Z'kila swallowed. 

With one last effort, the conjuror lifted his staff and healed the worst of Jeci'to's burns with a cooling breeze of white magic. But then the ground cracked open underneath and he was engulfed. 

Jeci'to looked to Z'kila, eyes wide. They had been cut down by half in an instant. Jeci'to was already burned and exhausted, the shaft of his spear black in places and flaming in others. Z'kila had just three arrows left. 

Ifrit roared, deafeningly loud, and then lowered his blazing gaze on Z'kila. 

_Fuck._

They were doomed. 

The primal stomped towards him, already gathering a great breath ready to incinerate him. Z'kila ran, as fast as his weak legs would carry him, hearing Jeci'to call out to him, muffled by the roar of fire. The ground cracked open and he hopped over the flames, feeling the tremor of each eruption behind him. 

_Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck_

He didn’t know whether it was the adrenaline or the Echo—still didn’t really know what that was—but something made him turn, draw and fire. The arrow grew mid-flight, much longer than Z'kila was tall, and shone brightly with ethereal light. It struck Ifrit in the chest in the middle of his next roar, gouging a great, radiant hole through the fiend’s chest. 

Ifrit howled, an agonising sound that nobody should ever have to witness, a moment before he dissolved into glowing fragments of aether. 

Z'kila maintained his pose of just-shot-an-arrow, still gazing at the spot where Ifrit vanished even after he heard the stirrings of activity somewhere behind him.  
‘Pray forgive my lateness!’ Thancred hurried to his side—after the fact, bloody _typical._

Z'kila dropped his arms and staggered under his own weight, struggling to even keep the bow in his grasp. Not that it mattered; the poor thing succumbed to the intense heat and cracked in two. Z'kila grimaced down at the two arms and threw it away. He turned his back on Thancred to look for Jeci'to and found a conjuror already at his side, helping him wince his way over.

Thancred went on, ‘I was-’

‘Conveniently delayed, probably,’ said Z'kila with a sniff. ‘Doesn’t matter. The primal’s dead. As are two adventurers. I’m going to go drop in an ice-cold bath and then sleep for a week.’

The soles of his feet screamed at him from the super-heated ground. His clothes were completely destroyed— _sorry, Luciane_ —and even the tips of his ears felt singed. He never wanted to see fire again, not even in a hearth in the depths of winter. He started to limp away with Jeci'to, more concerned for his friend than anything Thancred might have to say.

‘Ah, well, about that,’ Thancred interrupted, walking apace with them. ‘Minfilia would appreciate a report of the incident before any of that-’

‘No,’ Z'kila snapped. ‘You can tell Minfilia I am not going back to the Waking Sands until the beginning of next week at the earliest. Whatever history or geography lesson she has planned for me can wait until I stop seeing death and hearing voices. All right? You can find me- Actually, no, I’m not telling you where you can find me.’

Jeci'to chuckled and then winced like the effort hurt. 'It's nothing that can't be fixed,' he pointed out, accepting the shoulder Z'kila leant him. 

'And they can wait until it is,' Z'kila snapped. 

Thancred faltered. ‘…My friend, all of the Scions will want to see you both safe and well.’

Z'kila threw his arms out and cocked his hip in all of his smoking glory. ‘And as you can see, we are completely safe and completely well. They can wait. I’m sure you can regale them with the tale in our absence. Or, well, what you _imagined_ having happened.’ 

He didn’t miss the flash of hurt on Thancred’s face, nor the way Jeci'to's eyebrows shot into his fringe, but he didn’t much care for it. Bloody Scions. They’d been members, what, a week? And they were already sending him after eikons. What exactly did they do? 

‘I will, uh, tell Minfilia to expect you early next week, then, shall I?’

Z'kila saluted over his shoulder. He wasn’t thinking any further ahead than the Hourglass and potentially begging Momodi for private access to the washroom for the rest of the night. He expected Minfilia to shower him with apologies when he did see her next, to promise never to send him into a primal’s den again. 

But that didn’t happen.

**Author's Note:**

> I know the limit break for an archer is depicted as a crossbow in the game, but it didn't make any visual sense here so I took a bit of creative liberty with it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


End file.
